In rural endemic areas, up to 57% of epileptic cases can be attributed to neurocysticercosis or NCC. But adequate diagnostic tools in these settings are lacking, as neuroimaging techniques are often unavailable or inaccessible. So how can the diagnostic management of this life-threatening disease be improved? Immunological tests on serum or urine could be the key. These tests have shown uprising development in recent years, for both antibody and antigen detection. Our NeuroSolve PhD student Lisa Van Acker has performed a systematic review with the main focus of evaluating immunological test performance, also according to cyst localization, stage and number. Results indicate that immunodiagnosis of NCC has great potential, especially if suitable test formats undergo further large-scale field evaluations in the targeted settings. In this way, newly developed test formats such as the MAPIA and certain point-of-care tests promise to be of great value in early NCC diagnosis in the field, alongside existing laboratory tests.
The link to the full-text publication in PlosNTD can be found here: https://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journal.pntd.0012643 .
